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Comment by monster_group | Hacker News Reader

Since you brought up Sanskrit and topic of discussion is sentence structure I will provide one more data point. Because Sanskrit is a highly inflected language there is a lot of flexibility in sentence structure in Sanskrit. In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence. This flexibility comes at a very high price though - there are tens of ways in which a noun can transform and theoretically thousands of ways in which a verb can transform. The good thing though is that Panini and later grammarians gave us rules to go by so it is not as bad as it sounds.

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> In fact one can put the words in pretty much any order in a Sanskrit sentence.

But will all of those variants still be considered the "same" sentence? I'm asking because it's popular to make the same claim about Hungarian, but it's not really true. You can switch things around a lot and still get fully grammatical sentences that all relate to the same event. But due to Hungarian's topic/focus structure, the actual meanings expressed by the variants are so different that Hungarian speakers wouldn't consider them "the same sentence expressed a bit differently". Some examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis

In contrast, I believe Latin is really liberal in its sentence structure, especially in poetry.

Yeah, and reading Latin is complicated by the fact that Latin authors like to put the adjective and its noun on oppposite ends of a phrase and then stuff other things in between. So, instead of "the yellow car in my driveway that belongs to my brother" they'll say "the yellow in my driveway that belongs to my brother car". Because an adjective must match its noun in number, gender and case, the authors think of the noun and adjective as holding the phrase together. And this is only the beginning: in poetry there are even fewer patterns because the words are generally ordered to fit the meter: the only thing you can really count on is that certain particles must be the second word in a sentence (important because the manuscripts didn't have punctuation) and that a preposition always precedes its object.

Pretty much everything you said about Latin holds for Sanskrit too. Sanskrit has additional complication 'Sandhi' - euphonic combination [1]. There are many rules which are used to combine words depending on the ending sound of the first word and the beginning sound of the second. And you can keep on combining words as long as the rules are applicable. So you can get very long words without a break. Newbies often struggle with this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandhi

Yes, in most cases the sentence will still mean the same unless it's a very complicated sentence with multiple nouns and adjectives where there may be some ambiguity as to which adjective goes with which noun (and that too only if declensions happen to be in the same case). Having said that, the most common sentence structure used is still subject-object-verb.

It is for the most part (see answer above).

That's the story that's told in introductory texts, but the genitive generally forbids such permutations (depending on the flavor of usage in the geographical area).

There are actually only 7 kinds of सुप्s (x 3 numbers); there are about 10 तिङ्s, but only about 3-4 are in general usage. Then there are other sentence transformations outside these.

The relational modifiers "stick" to the roots, so moving words around the sentence is quite easy - this is particularly useful to poets who need to satisfy certain mathematical rules in their compositions. Much of this is also true for languages like Kannada/Hindi. There was also a paper about a KR scheme inspired by something of this kind.

Sanskrit is generally easy to pick up with the right teachers, in an immersive environment; the grammar-technique, esp. in a "sterile" environment, is rather terrible IMO.

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